Doctor Marigold

by Charles Dickens

Sometimes she
would sit looking at me and considering hard how to communicate with me
about something fresh,--how to ask me what she wanted explained,--and
then she was (or I thought she was; what does it signify?) so like my
child with those years added to her, that I half-believed it was herself,
trying to tell me where she had been to up in the skies, and what she had
seen since that unhappy night when she flied away. She had a pretty
face, and now that there was no one to drag at her bright dark hair, and
it was all in order, there was a something touching in her looks that
made the cart most peaceful and most quiet, though not at all melancholy.
[N.B. In the Cheap Jack patter, we generally sound it lemonjolly, and it
gets a laugh.]

The way she learnt to understand any look of mine was truly surprising.
When I sold of a night, she would sit in the cart unseen by them outside,
and would give a eager look into my eyes when I looked in, and would hand
me straight the precise article or articles I wanted. And then she would
clap her hands, and laugh for joy. And as for me, seeing her so bright,
and remembering what she was when I first lighted on her, starved and
beaten and ragged, leaning asleep against the muddy cart-wheel, it give
me such heart that I gained a greater heighth of reputation than ever,
and I put Pickleson down (by the name of Mim's Travelling Giant otherwise
Pickleson) for a fypunnote in my will.

This happiness went on in the cart till she was sixteen year old. By
which time I began to feel not satisfied that I had done my whole duty by
her, and to consider that she ought to have better teaching than I could
give her. It drew a many tears on both sides when I commenced explaining
my views to her; but what's right is right, and you can't neither by
tears nor laughter do away with its character.

So I took her hand in mine, and I went with her one day to the Deaf and
Dumb Establishment in London, and when the gentleman come to speak to us,
I says to him: "Now I'll tell you what I'll do with you, sir. I am
nothing but a Cheap Jack, but of late years I have laid by for a rainy
day notwithstanding. This is my only daughter (adopted), and you can't
produce a deafer nor a dumber. Teach her the most that can be taught her
in the shortest separation that can be named,--state the figure for
it,--and I am game to put the money down. I won't bate you a single
farthing, sir, but I'll put down the money here and now, and I'll
thankfully throw you in a pound to take it. There!" The gentleman
smiled, and then, "Well, well," says he, "I must first know what she has
learned already. How do you communicate with her?" Then I showed him,
and she wrote in printed writing many names of things and so forth; and
we held some sprightly conversation, Sophy and me, about a little story
in a book which the gentleman showed her, and which she was able to read.
"This is most extraordinary," says the gentleman; "is it possible that
you have been her only teacher?" "I have been her only teacher, sir," I
says, "besides herself." "Then," says the gentleman, and more acceptable
words was never spoke to me, "you're a clever fellow, and a good fellow."
This he makes known to Sophy, who kisses his hands, claps her own, and
laughs and cries upon it.

We saw the gentleman four times in all, and when he took down my name and
asked how in the world it ever chanced to be Doctor, it come out that he
was own nephew by the sister's side, if you'll believe me, to the very
Doctor that I was called after.